1. Field
The present invention relates generally to an improved data processing system and more specifically to a computer implemented method, system, and computer usable program code for mapping industry vertical models to legacy environments in a standard format to suggest points of enterprise application integration.
2. Description of the Related Art
The use of service-oriented architecture (SOA) environments and information services is fast becoming the preferred implementation for enterprise systems. Using SOA, an enterprise may be visualized as a collection of loosely coupled building blocks, called information services or business services. Information services provide a discrete business function, such as, for example, checking credit, opening an account, and so on, that can be adapted to a particular business context. As a business expands its enterprise capabilities, more information services are added to the network to accommodate the expansion.
In almost every instance where new information services are developed to support a set of business needs today, there is a set of existing custom built applications, software packages, middleware, operating systems and hardware components that have to be understood and at least integrated with the new services. These existing software and hardware components are known as “legacy” components. A legacy environment comprises components that have been inherited from languages, platforms, and techniques earlier than current technology. The process of integrating new services into an environment comprising legacy components is known as a “brownfield deployment”. The term “brownfield deployment” is taken from the building industry, where undeveloped land is described as “greenfield” and previously developed land is described as “brownfield”. A “greenfield deployment” describes a deployment in which applications are built in a “clean” environment with no existing components to consider.
Large organizations often continue to operate in a legacy environment because it is cost prohibitive for the organization to move to a completely new platform. A focus of IT professionals in these organizations is on the mining of data about the existing (legacy) components in the system to discover all of the legacy components and the relationships among them, as well as the automation of this data mining. This data mining is necessary as many components undergo modifications and upgrades over time, often without the associated documentation being updated. In addition, with the start of the retirement of the “baby boom” generation, industries are losing many of the only people with any detailed knowledge of these legacy components. These legacy environments are extremely complex with thousands of different components and represent significantly more complexity than any single, or even small team of, IT professional can retain in their head. Consequently, there is an emerging and urgent need to find a way to organize and visualize the information gathered through these mining efforts.